After congressmen passed a tax bill in the dead of night, columnist Joanna Allhands cooked up their next big reform. And wrote it on a napkin.

Are you a stockholder who derives most of your income from dividends and capital gains?

A speculator looking for more favorable tax treatment of your real estate earnings?

House Speaker Paul Ryan and fellow Republicans on Nov. 2, 2017.

House Speaker Paul Ryan and fellow Republicans on Nov. 2, 2017.

J. Scott Applewhite, AP

Or just a middle class working stiff willing to trade a temporary decrease in your tax bill for dramatically diminished Medicare coverage, Social Security benefits and local government services down the road?

If you match any of these descriptions, Congratulations! Michigan's Republican representatives in Congress are putting the finishing touches on one of the most spectacular fiscal frauds in America — and you are poised to be among its lucky beneficiaries.

If you're anyone else — that is, if you're among the vast majority of Michiganders who earn most of what they make by the sweat of their brow, pay state and local income taxes in the hopes of getting police and fire protection and safe roads, and are counting on Medicare and Social Security to sustain you when you retire — than you're about to get swindled, bigly.

A fraud in the home stretch

House and Senate conferees are still reconciling differences in the tax cut bills Republicans in both chambers adopted on party line votes, but it's clear that whatever they agree to will include the following features:

Permanent tax cuts for corporations and the pass-through mechanisms the nation's most affluent investors use to shield the income they derive from real estate partnerships and other investment schemes.

Temporary tax cuts for individuals, currently scheduled to evaporate by 2025.

The end of a century-old provision allowing tax filers to deduct their state and local income tax payments on their federal taxes — a cost that will be borne exclusively by taxpayers in Michigan and other industrial states that rely on income tax revenue.

A whopping $1 trillion addition to the federal debt, payable by whoever is unfortunate to inherit it in 2028.

All four joined the 227 House Republicans who voted for the House tax cut last month, and are poised to rubber-stamp whatever the conference committee charged to reconcile the House and Senate bills coughs up for Christmas. (Will the final version include shameless baubles like an exemption for Hillsdale College, the DeVos family's favorite evangelical Christian factory? Stay tuned, taxpayers!)

Critics who have dismissed the tax cut as a thinly-veiled plot to benefit the wealthiest Americans (and some less affluent red state voters) at the expense of virtually everyone else are not wrong, but they fail to appreciate just how disingenuous and cynical the Republican GOP tax cut is.

Virtually nobody in Washington believes the official GOP mantra that slashing taxes for corporations will translate into corporate hiring binges and pay hike for ordinary workers -- least of all the directors and CEOs who make those hiring decisions. They've already been standing on the sidelines with idle investment cash for months, and they know the lion's share of any corporate tax savings will go straight to stockholders.

But why are some of the same lawmakers who opposed relief for natural disaster victims in Texas and Puerto Rico on the grounds that it might increase the federal deficit now willing to incur such risks on behalf of a handful of wealthy political donors? Are they really that craven?

The GOP long game

Well, maybe. But many have a larger, more cynical strategic vision: to precipitate, or at least hasten, the sort of fiscal crisis that will leave the federal government no choice but to savage the entitlement programs millions in Michigan and other states are counting on to cushion their retirements.

This explains why even fanatical deficit hawks like Libertarian Rep. Justin Amash, R-Cascade Twp., cast their votes for the budget-busting tax cut. While other Michigan Republicans parroted the fraudulent argument that lower tax rates would eventually bequeath more than enough economic growth to erase the deficit, Amash told the truth: His vote for the tax cut, he said was a vote for a permanent reduction in government spending.

If ending deductions for state and local income tax payments make it harder for states and municipalities to sustain their revenues and forces them to cut services, too — well, that's just icing on the cake for those who live in gated communities with private security and enjoy fully-funded retirements.

So that's the plan: Modest, temporary tax cuts now: big, permanent reductions in Medicare and Social Security later. And all most people have to do to come out ahead is to die quickly, and soon.